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Album Art: The Invisible Teal, Debt and Quandaries

I’ve made hundreds of postcards, posters, and flyers for art exhibits, theatrical events, and concerts. It’s fun work compared to the emotional labor that creating art can sometimes be. For a couple of years I operated onewordlong as a boutique audio label. I designed some album packaging for the releases, with help from the individual project’s creators (I really should get around to reposting those recordings here).

The Invisible Teal’s “Debt & Quandaries” though, is the first time I stepped up to create art for someone else’s project. I’ve known Todd Hoover for more than a decade, and have watched his music, and his person, evolve a lot.

I got to listen to a rough version of the album, and felt like there was a lot of self-reflection and growth expressed in the songs. The image of a person looking out a window thinking about life occurred to me, so I decided to use “windows” as a jumping off point for my collage.

I visited with Todd a couple times, and he let me take photos of him, his workspace, as well as items from his creative archive. I included as many of those images as I could in an effort to make it feel ‘of him’. A number of Todd’s friends donated pictures for the album art, which I included in the final piece. One of my last ideas was was to have Todd write all the liner notes freehand rather than use a readymade font, a touch I really like.

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Todd was great about giving me all the time I needed, I moved while working on the art, and lost a month to that. I was able to let the ideas sit in the back of my mind, come back and make them clearer and stronger. He let me experiment and go wild, I wasn’t expecting the amount of freedom he gave me. That was intimidating, but I appreciate his confidence.

Here’s the final product (digital version)…

Debt & Quandaries, by The Invisible Teal / Todd Hoover

It’s very busy compared to most of my collage work, and should give fans a lot to look at as they enjoy listening to the album. Now that it’s done I’ll need some time to step back and consider how I feel about how it all came together. Most important, Todd is happy and The Invisible Teal are getting good response to the album, that’s the measure that really counts.